Sony's Shuhei Yoshida Expresses Disappointment in PS4 Review Scores.

As I reported here on GameSkinny yesterday, the press embargo on reviews for the PS4 launch titles was lifted. It looks like I wasn't the only one glued to Metacritic as the scores came pouring in.

Now that the scores have settled, it looks like Killzone: Shadow Fall is sitting on a 74, Knack dropped a little to 59, and the $15 shooter Resogun is getting the most positive reviews at 82.

The president of Sony Computer Entertainment, Shuhei Yoshida, sat down for an interview with Gamesindustry.biz and admitted that the review scores were very mixed... and lower than he would have liked.

Shuhei Yoshida: Yeah, it's disappointing to see some of the low scores. I haven't spent enough time reading reviews, but I would characterize them as mixed. I've played through all of our games, Killzone, Knack and Resogun, and I totally enjoyed playing through these games. I'm now on my second run of Knack and Resogun at a higher difficulty - these games really grow on you when you play more. I'm very confident that once you purchase these games and play, you'll be happy that you've done so.

When asked specifically about Mark Cerny, and if he was stretched too thin to really put enough effort into making Knack a better game, Yoshida had this to say;

No, I don't think that's right. He spent maybe a quarter of his time during the development of Knack and in his position of giving creative direction and overseeing development, it was appropriate... He was in Japan every month for a week, working with the team, so the communication was very good.

He goes on to say that the game was never built with high review scores in mind, and was always considered as a "second purchase." Yoshida also explains the delay of the launch title Drive Club as the dev team being "over ambitious" with their design and needing more time to integrate everything into the final package.

"[Knack is] not the type of game reviewers would score high for the launch of a next-gen system. The game was targeted as what we call a second purchase"

It's really an interesting interview so I suggest going to check it out in full. He's asked about the resolution issues in Call of Duty: Ghosts and what he thinks of Microsoft and games like Titanfall... his answers might just surprise you.

Also, if you missed the Black Friday episode of South Park last night, you can watch it now at Southparkstudios.

Yeah I've seen a lot of reviews that refer to the style as "bad saturday morning cartoon". There also seems to be a disconnect since the style indicates a family/kid friendly game... but it's actually pretty difficult with a learning curve.

I think 59 is unfair for Knack. Having played the demo at Eurogamer Expo 2013, I enjoyed it, even though I was a little crap it.

I think the low scores might be because it's a bit of an unusual game, especially to have at launch; it's very colourful and a bit cartoony. Although the gameplay mechanic is interesting (building up your size with debris from destroying things), it's still just another variation on a theme of the platformer though, so I wasn't ever expecting it to get amazing scores.

I agree that it probably is a bit more of a "second purchase" game though, but I don't think reviewers would use that as a reason to detriment score...at least I'd hope not :/